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Jan Smit (paleontologist)

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Dutch paleontologist (born 1948)
Jan Smit
Jan Smit looking at rocks.Jan Smit in 2017, supervising students looking at rocks
Born (1948-04-08) 8 April 1948 (age 76)
The Hague, Netherlands
Alma materUniversity of Amsterdam
OccupationPaleontologist
Known forAlvarez hypothesis
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsEvent stratigraphy
InstitutionsVrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Thesis A Catastrophic Event at the Cretaceous–Tertiary Boundary  (1981)

Jan Smit (born 8 April 1948) is a Dutch paleontologist. He was affiliated with the Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam from 2003 to 2013 as a professor of event stratigraphy, studying rapid changes in the geological record related to mass extinctions.

Career

Smit graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 1974 with a master's degree in geology. In 1981 he obtained his PhD (cum laude) at the same university.

Smit's main area of research is on the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, which ended the Cretaceous period and killed all non-avian dinosaurs. He was an early researcher into the now-accepted belief that an asteroid impact was responsible for their extinction; his dissertation, titled "A Catastrophic Event at the Cretaceous–Tertiary Boundary", was related to Luis and Walter Alvarez's recently published theory on the extinction event. The explanation is known as the Alvarez hypothesis, but was proposed independently by Smit, despite his later publication.

Luis Alvarez described Smit as "a KT expert has studied more KT sites around the world than anyone else". In 2019 The New Yorker labelled Smit as a "world authority" on the impact and extinction event.

Personal life

Smit's daughter is Renske Smit, a researcher at the Astrophysics Research Institute at Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, England. She is one of only a handful of UK-based astronomers in the core survey teams of the James Webb Space Telescope. Smit's son-in-law is Robert Crain, a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the same university.

Awards

In 2016, he was awarded the Van Waterschoot van der Gracht Medal.

A main-belt asteroid, 19140 Jansmit, is named after Smit.

References

  1. "Afscheidssymposium van hoogleraar Jan Smit". vu.nl (in Dutch). 2013. Archived from the original on 7 February 2015.
  2. "Een portret van Jan Smit" (in Dutch). 2015-02-07. Archived from the original on 2015-02-07. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  3. "The Day the Dinosaurs Died". The New Yorker. 29 March 2019.
  4. Administrator (2018-04-07). "Dr Renske Smit wins The 2018 MERAC Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis in Observational Astrophysics". www.astro.phy.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 2024-04-22.
  5. "Astrophysicist Renske Smit reacts to seeing 'furthest corner of known Universe'". www.ljmu.ac.uk. Retrieved 2024-04-22.
  6. Rob Crain (June 18, 2022). "Amusingly this is, literally, my father-in-law, aka jansmitforgeron" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  7. "Robert Crain". www.ljmu.ac.uk. Retrieved 2022-06-19.
  8. "Waterschoot van de Gracht penning". Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (in Dutch). Retrieved 2022-06-29.
  9. "IAU Minor Planet Center". minorplanetcenter.net. Retrieved 2022-06-19.
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